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Notes -
We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)
This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.
The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character
In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).
Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?
Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.
To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:
I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)
None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.
At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).
Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.
This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.
Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.
Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.
What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.
As a small public service here are a few excellent shows with extremely flawed female lead characters: Nighty Night, Enlightened, Six Feet Under, Pluribus, Killing Eve, Fleabag. Many more, but these spring to mind.
The more crowd pleasing you go the less flawed they get, so you get The Diplomat on Netflix where the main character is basically a bit disorganised and supposedly not good at manners and fashion. Or Homeland where our character is paranoid but her mental illness feels kind of separate to her (she is fundamentally good but has to deal with her own mania and paranoia).
But dig deeper and there is plenty of entertainment out there that features flawed women by creators with a deeper understanding of character than the person in the above video, and they aren't actually offensive to feminists or feminism at all as far as I can tell.
The MC in The Diplomat is not disorganized or bad at fashion or manners. She is in fact explicitly hyper competent, to the point she's being considered for the vice presidency based on merit. That's the point of the show. The conflict in her character is that she's not where she wants to be, doing things she doesn't want to do, tied to a marriage she wants to end but can't, and surrounded by people who lie to her. I personally quite like her characterization.
Calling that show crowd-pleasing does not match my experience. My normie wife could not make it through a single episode. Whereas I like it because I'm a nerd for international relations and US Gov stuff. On the other hand I think a show likes Fleabag is much more of a crowd pleaser, with all its little winking naughtiness and fourth wall breaking, it's very modern vibes, no wonder it gets so much acclaim. And yet I got bored and couldn't finish the first episode, partly because I found the MC insufferable.
I really hate the way The Diplomat is written. I don’t really know how to describe it, but if I did I’d have to call it something like ‘midwit core’. It feels like Scandal, which imagined itself as a political thriller but which was actually about the super hot protagonist secretly being the most powerful person in the world and hypercompetent and hot and every gorgeous guy wanted her for her brains AND beauty. Okay, yeah I remember Wattpad too. Scandal would also randomly drop in obscure references to domestic or international politics in one liners to make the show seem smarter than it was.
There is just the sense in The Diplomat, too, that the writer is so smug for occasionally throwing in a line of obscure Wikipedia or Whitehall or Foreign Policy or intelligence circle / tradecraft stuff or Britishisms she doesn’t really understand and thinking that this has lent this ridiculous thriller a certain realism. For example, the writer’s grasp of the British class system, Westminster intrigue, the makeup of the Conservative and Labour parties, what the right and the left want, is so warped, it’s like the foreign correspondent for the New York Times in London spent six hours editing the script. It’s not about ‘realism’ - the average American political thriller that features the UK is entirely unobjectionable even in its ridiculousness because it doesn’t pretend to understand domestic politics. The Diplomat will throw in references to niche recent historical events (not like Brexit), specific newspapers or conferences, an Oxford college, a minor public school, a members club, a medium sized financial institution, later US politics too, but in a way that like an LLM would when it’s being overly niche in an unrealistic way, with no background, with no deep cultural understanding of anything (“give me a random deep cut reference that only someone in the New England upper middle class would understand. Make no mistakes”). I note that the creator and writer worked on later seasons of the West Wing, when it got much worse for this, because even when Sorkin is at his worst (which is often) his dialogue, while unrealistic and ultra-liberal, has a certain weight on background that The Diplomat just lacks.
I also find the show’s politics particularly grating. It’s not that it’s like a final vestige of Hillary Clinton era ‘neoliberalism’ or whatever we’re calling it now. I literally liked The Newsroom, I’m clearly not politically picky with my television. I think it’s that this is a prestige drama that sees itself very firmly as imparting a Very Specific Message That is Very Important, when actually it’s a poorly plotted (loosely) “political” thriller where the villains are perennially either venal Biden staffer types who just want power or some loose constellation of bumbling evil ‘far right’. The irony is that I think the main villain is actually an attempt by the writers to cast a Hillary Clinton type as bad, her paranoia damning the world if our heroic and very similar Powerful Woman doesn’t stop her, retroactively excusing 2016 in an “it wasn’t the ideas or the type of person, just the wrong person” kind of a way.
Keri Russell is good. She was always good and the problems with this show are 99% a bad script. Her husband’s character is probably the best in the show.
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